Am Samstag, den 22.04.2006, 17:09 +0200 schrieb Peter Bex: > On Sat, Apr 22, 2006 at 04:21:02PM +0200, J?rg F. Wittenberger wrote: ... > I've taken a look at the Askemos webpage and read your description a > number of times, but I can't really grasp *what* Askemos is exactly. > Is it an operating system, a language, a web development framework, a > system to make concurrent programming reliable or a system that makes > it easy to use a number of redundant servers? Or is it all of these > things?
It's all of these. Well the easy part is still sort of questionable. Depends on what you compare. If you look at it from 3000 feet, you see an operating system, because an operating system manages computer resources. As such it has been hard all the times to distinguish between operating system and language implementation. As long as we talk about assembler or C, things are clear, but when you add threads and garbage collection, the difference blurs away. At the other hand: expect funny reactions when telling people "this OS is written in Scheme". If you look at it as an application developer, you always see it though some HTTP/S request response scheme. So web dev framework applies. Since that's what we do to make our living, this aspect gets better over time. So it's a reliable distributed - ähm, uh... - app server? Actually Askemos is only the concept: all objects (be them documents or processes) of a legal system (to be modelled) are represented at a "place" (which is basically an agent/object, serves as either deed, file or process). Certain properties are ensured by the agreement protocol: clear authorship, tamper proofed, no rights escalation, no corruption, agreed execution. There's a VM, which defines how processes are executed. Beeing XML it's as language and hardware independent as it can get. Anything would be better but that's why XML is the worst common denominator everybody accepts as readable. (The "Justizkommunikationsgesetz" [would this be "justice comunication act" ??] for instance defines for Germany that XML would be acceptable. Not much else.) Beyond the VM-Level we stop talking about Askemos itself. There are two more levels the protocol (http+extension) and the implementation (ball). If we distinguish these, we come closer to the questions. Yes, this should be visible at the web site. Thanks for asking. Hm, now I'm in trouble: one says "drop the ball part" from the page, here it's back. > I'm sorry if I sound stupid and I don't mean to insult, but I really > don't understand what Askemos does. I think I speak for everyone here > if I say that we want a system that is *easy* to hack. It should be > simple and lightweight, just like Chicken itself. What makes Scheme > interesting is that it's small enough to fit in your head and > nevertheless is powerful enough to do anything you want. A web > framework in Scheme should have the same qualities. Agreed. That's our goal as well. At the application level it's not that hard. All you do usually: put all you stuff in a webdav folder. Start on of you Scheme scripts as a process and you are done. There's no principal difference to other frame works. Except for completeness. If you need to access C libraries or other compiled code, you need to export it properly. Not too hard either, I'd say. Let's put it that way: once they got it up and running, a few people liked it. That's good and bad: good for as relative success, bad for the total amount. But it runs single host as well. And that is at least supposed to work out of the box. /Jörg _______________________________________________ Chicken-users mailing list Chicken-users@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/chicken-users